Development of a Hardware-in-the-Loop Platform for a Teleoperation Flexibility Robotic System

Abstract

A control method for a cable-driven robot in a teleoperation system is proposed using the hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) simulation technique. The main components of the teleoperated robotic system are a haptic device, also called a delta robot, and a cable-driven hyper-redundant (CDHR) robot. The CDHR manipulator has higher flexibility and multiple degrees of freedom (DOF), and, therefore, its inverse kinematics are complex. For this reason, the Jacobian method is used in place of the conventional method to calculate the inverse kinematics. Moreover, the two robots constituting the telerobotic system are different in terms of their mechanical structures and workspaces. Therefore, the position mapping method is applied to ensure that the two workspaces are utilized together. However, a singularity area appears when the mapping parameter is adjusted to expand the workspace. Therefore, a haptic algorithm is proposed to prevent the robot from moving into the singularity region and generate force feedback at the end-effector of the haptic device to warn the operator. Because experimental verification of this control strategy is difficult, the HIL technique is used for demonstration in this study to ensure stability and safety before implementation of the method at the experiment scale. The CDHR robot is designed using SolidWorks 2021. Then, the Simscape model is used to simulate the telerobotic system. In addition, the protocol between the haptic device and the laptop is programmed using C/C++ language to facilitate communication with the CDHR robot in MATLAB Simulink 2022a. A few trials are conducted to evaluate and demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.